Yes. It is better to type Ctrl+Alt+F1 to arrive in the terminal (the real frightening one, yes). Then login and launch sudo reboot. That's a better way than just pushing the restart button.

But before rebooting, you may want to kill the problematic process. Type ps -ejH in the terminal to list the current processes. Spot which one is problematic (let's arbitrarily take the example of banshee). Then type killall banshee. Go back into your graphical interface by hitting Ctrl+Alt+F7.